Dino 'graveyard' reveals first Asian triceratops

The first big discovery has already emerged from what has been called the world’s largest dinosaur fossil site.

In China’s Shandong province, the 2-metre-long skull of a close relative of the famed horned dinosaur triceratops has been unearthed. It marks the first evidence that the group, called ceratopsids, ever lived outside western North America.

Advertisement

Although some of their early ancestors lived in Asia, true ceratopsids had been found only in late Cretaceous deposits in Alaska, western Canada, and the western US. Why they stayed in such a small range when the duck-billed dinosaurs and tyrannosaurs that lived alongside them also roamed into Asia had been a mystery.

The Chinese fossil “shows that eastern Asia and western North America were even more similar in biogeography than we previously thought,” says Tom Holtz of the University of Maryland.

Ceratopsid bones normally are found in moist environments, but most Asian late Cretaceous fossils come from arid areas. The Shandong bone bed shows that the large dinosaurs of the previously poorly known wet zones of Asia resembled their North American counterparts.

Zhao says studies of the new fossils won’t be published until late this year. Holtz can’t wait. “It will be cool to see what else they find there,” he says.